What Difference do Withdrawn Objects Make?

In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”, Peirce proposes his infamous pragmatic principle:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 31)

While I don’t accept the highly positivistic reading of this principle that Peirce proposes– for him it must make some difference to our five senses –I do nonetheless think he here articulates a good rule of thumb for evaluating concepts we should entertain and concepts we should just ignore. Here are a couple of examples. Suppose someone approaches me with the claim that everything in the universe doubles in size every 30 seconds. While this is certainly a provocative and interesting thesis, it is not clear that it’s something that we should entertain for long. If everything in the universe doubled in size every 30 second, then this “phenomenon” would be undetectable because everything, relative to everything else, would be exactly the same size. Thus, for example, while my ruler at T2 would now have inches that are two inches long compared to my ruler at T1, I would have no way of knowing this because all of the relative sizes of everything would be the same. Consequently, while it might be true that this is happening, there’s just no way anyone can know anything about it and thus it makes no difference in our thought.

Now, it’s likely that there aren’t many people arguing that everything is doubling in size every 30 seconds, but we do find philosophical debates that are analogous to this. One debate that comes to mind is the debate between free will and determinism. The determinist argues that insofar as we are a part of nature, all of our actions are predetermined such that we have no say in them. If I commit murder, for example, it wasn’t that I chose to commit murder. I no more chose to commit murder than the ocean tides choose to rise or ebb. Rather, this action was ineluctable given causal chains that begin with the beginning of time (if time has a beginning). Following Peirce’s principle, it is likely that even if this thesis is true, we’ll be inclined to simply ignore it. Why? Because even if it is true we will still experience our actions and the actions of others as actions we chose and that we’re responsible for. I simply cannot escape the impression that I’m the one that chooses to walk across the room.

It is these kind of claims that Kantian, post-Kantian, Anglo-American, and scientists denounce as “metaphysical”. A metaphysical claim is a claim that makes no difference. Consider the arguments that some conciliatory religious believers try to make. The scientists are right, they say, to claim that the account of creation depicted in Genesis is untrue, and that species evolved through a process of evolution. However, they continue, there is no contradiction in the claim that God fulfills his plan through evolution. Quite right! There is no contradiction in the suggestion that God fulfills his plan through evolution. However, the problem is that the introduction of supernatural agency into evolutionary processes produces no difference in how we investigate evolutionary processes. In other words, the supernatural supplement adds nothing to our account of evolution and therefore we’re left wondering why we should include it at all. This is a perfect example of a metaphysical thesis in the derogatory sense.

It seems to me that one of the single greatest challenges that proponents of withdrawn objects face is this charge of proposing an empty metaphysical abstraction that makes no difference. I resolve to treat the object as withdrawn from all relations such that we have no access to it whatsoever (this is not, incidentally, my concept of withdrawal). In this way I seek to preserve the object form all erasure under relation. Yet in doing this, what has happened? Have I not won a Pyrrhic victory? Insofar as I’ve claimed that the object is withdrawn from all relation and access, I’m also led to the claim that nothing can be said of the object qua object because the object is withdrawn. As a consequence, the object becomes, at the level of concepts, an empty point. As thoroughly withdrawn, I am unable to say anything of the object. Any quality that I might attribute to its reality is necessarily a quality for me (in relation), and not a quality of the object itself. And this is true both metaphysically (in the non-pejorative sense) and epistemologically. It’s not just that the object is empty for me, the person seeking to know the object. No, it is also that the object is empty for any other object, because the real being of the object is withdrawn from each and every object, existing in a self-contained vacuum, unable to touch any other object.

read on!
In other words, it seems that withdrawn objects conceived in this way, can make no conceivable difference because they are so thoroughly withdrawn that they are unable to touch or be touched by anything else. The object-oriented philosopher might protest, claiming that the positing of real objects makes a profound difference at the level of inquiry. For example, they might argue against a thinker like Derrida, characterizing Derrida’s position as the view that there’s an infinite semiosis of signifiers that are never reach a final signifier, such that the object can never be brought into presence in language. To this the object-oriented philosopher responds that while the object can never be brought to presence in language, that it can only be alluded to, the object can nonetheless be present to itself. Yet from the practical standpoint, it’s not clear how this claim makes any difference or how it differs from the claim that the universe doubles in size every 30 seconds. Strangely the object-oriented philosopher has both conceded the Derridean point (as he’s characterized it), while nonetheless thumbing his nose at the Derridean conclusion that we can’t pin down the object insofar as it’s asserted that the object can be present to itself. The literary critic is nonplussed because regardless of whether the object is present to itself, the literary critic is in exactly the same position as she was before. As a result she’s left scratching her head, wondering why she’s supposed to stop doing what she was doing before. In other words, the withdrawn object has made no real difference to her concrete, existential practices and relation to texts.

What the object-oriented philosopher has to explain is what difference withdrawn objects might make. Yet in answering this question it seems that it’s necessary to concede that withdrawn objects make differences that aren’t withdrawn. This isn’t a retreat back to correlationism, but rather the suggestion that perhaps what’s important in object-orientation doesn’t lie in withdrawal as it’s been dominantly conceived.

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21 Responses to “What Difference do Withdrawn Objects Make?”

Interesting conclusion Levi, I thought the same thing about Meillassoux’s arche-fossil thought-example. How is it relevant, beyond ‘evil genie’ type tests of consistency? There is a certain relevance of the challenge I guess.

It is not clear to me how and or why ‘correlationism’ suffers however, except to smuggle an immanent ‘faith’ in through a post-correlationist backdoor (there is something beyond what can be observed, measured, constitute experience or even deduced, as all of these involve relations). The quasi-religiosity of a faith in withdrawn objects is one of the most disquieting aspects of OOP.

Faith is certainly not part of correlationism. Belief is, in the sense of having a certain ‘sense’ of a state of affairs etc. Reason, passion, faith were all ‘objects’ that prompted Hume’s philosophy of the mind (at least in Deleuze’s reading) as they do not correlate with any immanent objective reality, and are therefore taken to be affections, and products of human consciousness. Meillassoux’s challenge to correlationism is to posit an object — something immeasurably old as to defy human capacity to think it — that demands faith to believe in it.

The production of an absence of relations may be one possible conclusion, but, then, how is this not simply the inverse of an analysis of relations, similar to how Deleuze (relations, abundance, everything is an event) and Derrida (positivity of absence, event-of-differal) are read together? That is, what state of affairs could have possibly produced such an absence?

Right. I guess within my framework (onticology not OOP), the difference produced is that objects can never be reduced to their occurent qualities. Change contexts or relations and you get different qualities. At the level of practices this entails that we should seek attractors, singularities, or potentialities (the virtual), rather than resting content with present qualities. I think that suggests quite a difference in both political and scientific practices: substances always harbor more than we attribite to them in their current presence to us.

I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you take this issue by the horns. I am an enthusiast of the OO approach, if not quite on board all the way, because I find it a compelling way of thinking about things and their relationships. But the issue of “the difference it makes” has always troubled me. I can see why it is a beautiful or at least striking consequence of the way Harman plays out Heidegger’s hammer-story. But I always hear Wittgenstein’s voice remarking: “a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.” (P.I. 271). I have some guesses of my own, but I am not sworn to defeat correlationism, so I feel I have different options. I hope you keep thinking this one through.

If “the difference produced is that objects can never be reduced to their occurent qualities”, and that these change by context, how is this different from Latour, e.g. in Irreductions? I ask this because Latour is a through-and-through “relativist”, and OOO is usually posited as in direct opposition to relational reduction. What is the difference made by this opposition?

(I suspect that you’ve heard this question numerous times before, so I’d appreciate any good links on this.)

“substances always harbor more than we attribite to them in their current presence to us.”
yes, they exceed our grasp and so are open to interactions other than our habitual ones, Pickering’s “mangle” had some issues but his basic pragmatist proposal of experimentation/invention seems like a good start.

Very interesting, I have a couple of objections though. To say that God adds nothing to the methodologies or conclusions that we would employ in considering evoution is quite right. It seems to me however that this example is unnecessary in your post, simply because that observation is more of a moot, tautological reflection on the limits, focus and methodology of the scientific mode of enquiry than it is on the validity of the possiblity of God. Indeed if you are content in your existential reflections only to consider the mechanisms of how we came to be than that is fine, however it may be unsatisfactory. There are a variety of scientific considerations which may necessitate the consideration of God, especially cosmological, in light of the contingency of our existence.What I mean by this is that the particulars of existence, you me, etc are explained in terms of a scientific description of the other things to which our existence must make recourse for it’s explanation. The existence of the very first things that came to be however, were equally contingent, with no physical thing upon which they were contingent, i.e. the existence of existence itself, the very possiblity of such a thing indeed, necessitates a non-physical agent. As does the fact that the smallest particles are unexplained in light of other physical things, i.e. the fabric of our existence too is unexplained. I’m not trying to argue that God exits per se, I’m simply trying to point out that you make strong assertions about things making ‘no difference’ without always qualifiying the terms in which you mean that they make no difference. As aforesaid God quite rightly makes no difference to our consideration of the evolutionary process in and of itself as a scientific theory of how we came to be, but the whole point of trying to consider our being is that it has wider areas relevance, which may include discussions about metaphysics. It may be advisable to avoid smuggling in latent, unadmitted values and covering them with moot tautological assumptions masquerading as an explanation. To do so is at best a methodological error in your philosophy, at worst a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader as to the value of your observations and conclusions.

This seems to be true only if you say that allusion is nothing or does nothing. I am not sure why that has to be the case. I think it makes a difference whether we only talk about the accessible or if we can allude or make reference to something outside it.

The point about whether it changes the practice or the work of others is an interesting thought, and I’m not really qualified to say (though I think it has been making some difference, just in what I’ve read and seen from various blogs, etc).

But I think this problem of allusion is really a central problem. If we can allude to a reality that isn’t directly available, or actual, then I think that is different from a system in which we are unable to do so. For instance, even in onticology, we are unable to bridge the distance between systems and their informational closure—but I wouldn’t want to say that whether this system is operating in an autonomous way doesn’t make a difference. In fact, it makes all the difference in one way, because then you have to account for the way systems are able to interlock, influence and then possibly separate from each other. But you can’t do that by having a transcendent view of the systems, but only by drawing distinctions and observing from within. It seems like a kind of allusion to me. The idea that creating knowledge is only creating more systems and more distinctions, rather than standing above them or clearing them away, is onticology’s own form of indirect contact or allusion. I could very well be wrong, though.

“I think that suggests quite a difference in both political and scientific practices: substances always harbor more than we attribite to them in their current presence to us.”

Yes, this is my precise sense of why we can’t just directly give or show the entity in its total reality—because the reality, the virtual proper being, is in excess of its particular contextualization and series of engagements, and that means our perception and relation to it, too. This is the essence of your political thought, it seems to me. How can we better the social, political and media systems if we can’t allude to its as yet unrealized or uncontextualized being?

What if there are only ‘occurent qualities’? I don’t mean the obvious primary/secondary qualities distinction, but that the composition of matter and energy are entirely compositional and contingent. As energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, then this or that composition of matter and energy is continually being transformed (ie entropy) since the beginning of the universe. The given composition of anything would therefore be a particular contingent composition of matter and energy. Isn’t this what meillassoux is getting at with his hyper-chaos (or, as I have always understood it, Guattari’s chaosmos)?

I’d argue this is a far harder task for any OOP: rather than simply ‘withdrawing’, when observed, the composition of the matter and energy change, always! Or is OOP is describing an anthropomorphic consistency in the composition of matter and energy as ‘objects’? Unless one wants to argue for an absolute non-relationism, and therefore avoid a recomposition of matter and energy, etc. I can’t really see how this can be avoided.

Withdrawal isn’t a feature of how humans observe objects but a property of objects themselves. It’s at work in objects regardless of whether anyone observes objects. Objects cannot be reduced to occurent qualities because there must be something capable of change for these changes to occur. This is why Deleuze distinguished between the virtual and the actual. The virtual is that something that is withdrawn.

Why is a contingent composition of anything not capable of being an object, either for Levi or Graham? For both object-oriented philosophy and onticology, there is a mereology at work—one that you don’t really find in Meillassoux, as he abolishes any kind of sufficient reasons for things at the level of their composition. Having a contingent causal history doesn’t make the concept of object incoherent. This seems like more of the…well, both oceans and runway models need compositions of matter and energy, so that’s all they are, everything else is bestowed by human consciousness?

PS: Just looking at my post again, I spoke too quickly about Meillassoux and mereology—contingency works at the level of worlds or the laws of a world, and then govern what is probable or improbable within it (it is the laws and structures themselves which are neither probable or improbable, it seems, and can change for no reason). But one of the reasons I am immediately drawn to object-oriented thought is that this relationship between contingency and probability, of changing or staying the same, the reasons for it, is located at the level of individual agencies rather than powerful, overarching laws or structures (be it Time or supercontingency, or Being). Levi has a fascinating account of this, I think, by finding the ontological difficulty of just existing, of creating temporal moments, at the heart of the entity or object themselves. Add to this the bizarre mereology of potential objects within objects, and I think that is already a better explanation for composition, decomposition and recomposition. It seems more empirical, too, in the broad sense that it has to take specific entities and their own internal fight against entropy seriously.

Hi Joseph, it is problematic because the sense we make of this composition of matter and energy is a product of our perceptual and conceptual apparatus. Either we say this river here in all its singularity (pure materiality/duration/thisness) or it is any river as an example of riverness (transcendental idealism). Compositions of matter and energy, however presented, will always be a secondary quality. The objectness of a composition of matter and energy is a secondary quality (what Levi calls an occurent quality) of the matter and energy. Arguing that this or that particular composition is an ‘object’ is ‘correlationist’.

Meillassoux’s point about an absolute hyper-chaos is well taken, but as I say above, I don’t see how this is different to Guattari’s chaosmos.

I’d argue that causality is not absolute either, but is distributed as a consequence of the sense (sens) we perceive of the world as we fold with it. Or, to flip it, from the Tralfamadorians’ (from Slaugterhouse Five) or Doctor Manhattan’s (from The Watchmen) perspective, perceiving all reality at once and therefore folding the cosmos absolutely, causality is irrelevant, as every occurence is already always happening.

I think OOO and onticology specifically addresses this problem better: what must the world be like for us to relate and have knowledge about it? Indeterminate, non-specified clumps of matter and energy just don’t work. But neither do we simply know things are they are, either, as knowledge is simply a subset of a larger, more significant distinction drawn by onticology: relation. Otherwise you risk making humanity an essential ingredient in being itself—that doesn’t make sense, either. There is something between pure materiality without form or structure and transcendental idealism. Namely, the partially translatable individual entity.

Besides, if you know OOO, it immediately grants your first premise, anyway, but without the difficulty of saying that, therefore, NO essence or form or system exists outside of human concepts.

There is a lot of blog discussion going on now about withdrawal and so forth, and it’s fascinating. Levi has written on this in many, many places—in fact, his fantastic book is really all about it in one way or another—but I still can’t help but think that Levi’s philosophy is still one of, in Harman’s language, direct and indirect relationship. The virtual proper being of the object is of a different order from the local manifestations it actualizes in any various regime of attraction. It has to be. Neither is more important than the other, though, and I can’t help but think that in both Graham and Levi, it is the world of manifestation that we have the glue that keeps the universe sticky and moving and changing.

I think the far more interesting problem or tension between Graham and Levi’s work isn’t direct/indirect poles, but rather the dispute between actualized or unactualized qualities—Graham has the latter, which Levi does not.